About Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama has a self-proclaimed addiction to cities. At age 73, his work still shares the same inclination to record his surroundings as his earliest pictures, taken during the dramatic transformation of 1960s post-war Japan. Moriyama used his camera to document the American military occupation of his country and the dissolution of traditional values experienced alongside accelerated modernization. In a process he maintains today, Moriyama shot with a small hand-held automatic camera, rarely with attention to the viewfinder (firing his shutter as if by machine gun.) In his depictions of city life, Moriyama documents cultural change and chaotic urban experience, typically in grainy, black-and-white, high-contrast images, which he prints himself. Early influences include photographers Eikoh Hosoe, Eugène Atget, Weegee, and William Klein, all who shared a similar affection for the dynamics of city life.